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Month: January 2013

Our Father Who Art in Heaven, stay there with your retinue of saccharine angels and saints, orchestrating the celestial fanfare, while we remain below, content to breathe the pine-filled air, to feel the wind caress the napes of our necks, to see the sun illuminate the hills as if every morning were the first time, to sense the ground beneath our feet and not above our heads, sealing us off in darkness and silence from everything we love. We tally up our losses and our gains to find that overall it’s not half-bad to be alive. Amen

She pours through the doors of the coffee shop near the corner of Keele & Dundas like
molasses—alone.—–Her lips are slathered in strawberry-pink ice cream; she hand-rolls a cigarette, her
hair knots in an up draft.—–One by one, she opens a handful of sugar packets, pouring the contents on the
table; she puts a straw to her wind-cracked lips and blows out an outline of a mountain,
humming like a harmonica trapped in a hurricane. Her moist tongue then outlines the
shape of a hip bone, then the CN Tower.—–Dragging her fingers along the linoleum finish, she recreates Van Gogh’s Starry
Night. When it’s done, she forces her hand through the white grain like a monk through a
mandala.—–Everything is impermanent.—–A pigeon flies into the window. It dies.—–I once saw a dead magpie in Calgary. With rocks tied to its legs and body with
school-grade pipe cleaners, it died in pain. I photographed it and studied the
decomposition of its wings while heading North through the Ice Field Parkway, the great
gash in Western Canada. I studied it like the short stumpy legs of Deedy from the angle
of between her thighs.…

You are nineteen. It is a year after you broke up with your first girlfriend and now your first girlfriend is standing above you as you kneel on the ground. And while she is your ex now, she is still your friend because you need her. Specifically, you need her to shave your head.

She shaves your head for you, and you finally feel butch—like a real lesbian. As if there is a lesbian norm. And if there is one, then you are it with your shaved head.

You have finally decided to shave your head because the older woman you had a crush on, Emma, simultaneously broke your heart and pissed you off. This is how you rebel. This shaved head that you know Emma would hate. This shaved head that you actually love.

But you cannot get the thought of Emma out of your mind. She stays inside your brain so much that you can’t do anything else but wallow in the words she last said to you—that she never wants to talk to you again. You will remember she said this because you did something that made her mad, that made her think you were some silly little girl she didn’t want to waste her time on, though you will forget what it was, exactly, that you did to her.…

The minister was over for dinner Our precocious five-year-old son thin blonde hair flying off his head leaned over the table with an intent expression and asked the ReverendDo you know that there are over a hundred-thousand Gods?…and some of them have elephant heads?

I wondered: How did he come up with this shit? A powerful imagination he had I couldn’t see it as a good thing especially after what happened next

The Reverend caught by surprise inhaled a piece of brisket He choked choked to death actually neither me nor my wife knowing that maneuver when someone chokes

My wife ran out the front door her grey and blue plaid dress flying behind her but by the time someone got there –the veterinarian who’d been seeing to one of the neighbor’s calves– it was too late

The Reverend lay on the floor his face blue as an elephant-headed God’s

My son learned that there is information that should not be shared secrets that need keeping My son learned that elephant-headed Gods don’t want Baptist preachers to know about them They wanted their elephant-headed secrets kept close

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